Debbie Mayo-Smith: Email tips add up to big savings

Debbie Mayo-Smith.

Following my last column on boosting your inbox productivity, here are my top 10 tips. These tips can save you at least half an hour a day - three weeks a working year.

* Rules - your personal inbox secretary
What: This function automatically reads your incoming or outgoing emails and performs the tasks you set - filing, forwarding, answering and deleting.

How to use: Automatically sort incoming emails, answer web inquires quickly, perform routine tasks, sort through irrelevant emails.

Where: Outlook: Tools>Rules. Lotus Notes: Tools>Rules. Gmail: Settings > Filters.

* Tasks - never forget again
What: Your automatic memory prompt, persistency builder and project manager.

How to use: Build in sales tenacity by reminding yourself to follow up on proposals and quotes. Build relationship management by reminding yourself to call regularly. Assign meeting action points to individuals and prompt them. To remind staff of due items, such as expense or sales reports. To take a project from start to finish - even assigning time and mileage.

Where: Outlook: The Tasks icon. Lotus Notes: To Do. Gmail: Tasks.

* Drag and drop - never type out again
What: Dragging and dropping can replace cut and paste, and typing out from scratch.

How to use: Drag incoming emails into contacts to create a new contact. Drag to calendar to create a new appointment or meeting. Drag to Windows Explorer to save the email (and attachments). Even better, you can highlight text within an email and drag and drop that instead of the entire email.

Where: Primarily an Outlook function. Lotus Notes: You can drag and drop into the To Do list only. Gmail: not available.

* Archive - speed up and slim down
What: Archives store your older emails instead of deleting or keeping them in your inbox. It's like taking some of your emails and moving them to a different filing cabinet drawer.

How to use: Archiving is automatic in Outlook and Lotus. You can set the parameters (unless corporate policy overrides you). Also, wonderfully, you can set when you want your folders to be archived, from which period to archive, and each folder can have its own archiving policy.

Where: Outlook and Lotus: Tools > Archive. Gmail - not necessary.

* Reply signature - thousands of seconds saved

* Repetitive phrase signatures - not only for contact details.
(I wrote about these two last time. See here.)

* Autopreview & preview pane - scan without opening
What: Save oodles of time clicking open and reading every email.

How to use: Autopreview - see the first three lines. Reading Pane - view the entire email without opening it. The view can be the bottom half of your screen or on the right third of your screen.

Where: Outlook: View > Autopreview and Preview Pane. Lotus Notes: View > Preview Pane > Show Preview. Both Outlook and Lotus Notes show either a vertical or horizontal reading pane. Gmail: Settings >Snippets.

* Search folders
What: Virtual folders. Using a keyword or preformatted folders, you can view all emails in the search folder regardless of their actual folder location.

How to use: Never go over your mailbox limit again by looking through the size folder - you can immediately see where the gigantic (+5 megs) files are for quick deletion. If you're using a lot of rules, quickly see what's new by viewing new emails via the unread email folder.

Where: Outlook: search folder is under the Sent folder. Gmail and and Lotus Notes: use search.

* Reorder your folders
What: Change the ABC order of your inbox folders and kiss goodbye to scrolling up and down.

How to use and where: Outlook, Lotus Notes: Put a letter, number or symbol in front of your folder name. For example, changing the name of an inbox folder from "website" to "1website" would reorder it from down in the W's up to the very first folder. Gmail: Settings >Labels.

* Categories - Target with a click
What: You can assign categories to your emails, contacts, appointments and tasks. How to use: I use categories most with contacts. It's utterly marvellous. You can create categories to suit your business, assign them to contacts, and easily re-sort your contacts by category. Examples of categories might be: people who get your newsletter, those who bought a certain product, industry type. The limit is only your imagination.

Where: Lotus Notes: Contact >Category. Outlook 2003: Click open a contact. The category button is at the bottom centre. Outlook 2007: A four-coloured square icon is on the Toolbar, and you can get to it thorough Edit. Gmail: Contacts >Groups (new Group), and also Labels.

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* Debbie's Business Speed Networking Event is on December 10. For more information: www.debbiespeaks.co.nz/mayosmith.htm

Debbie Mayo-Smith is a bestselling author and international speaker.